Did factory farms cause swine flu?

It’s almost a truism of political conversation that Big Ag’s lobby has a stranglehold over Washington. If you’ve ever wondered if that’s true, you need only consider just how quickly President Obama changed “swine flu” to the obscure, overly scientific, and far more syllable-rich name H1N1, as per the request of the pork lobby.

The pork industry has also put the kibosh on stories that the first human and pig outbreaks, respectively, of the swine flu epidemic were linked to an American-owned pig feedlot in Mexico and one in North Carolina.

Well, now that argument has a strange but potentially powerful spokesperson: Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything Is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and recently Eating Animals, a nonfiction book that makes the case against that activity.

Safran Foer, in an appearance on the Ellen DeGeneres show last week, aired those allegations. (DeGeneres is one of a growing number of Hollywood celebrities to advocate veganism.)

“This swine flu that’s now an epidemic, they’ve been able to trace it back to a farm in North Carolina,” he said. “A hog farm. Nobody knows this. Nobody talks about it. We’ve been told this lie that it came from Mexico.”

His claims echo research that the current swine flu virus has its genetic roots in an epidemic that swept a North Carolina hog farm a decade ago. (No humans were infected.)

No one has been able to prove that link conclusively, but scientists have made a reasonable case. Scientists and health policy experts agree that swine flu was likely incubated at a factory hog farm, where close quarters and high turnover facilitate widespread illness.

In other words, the vector of this particular virus notwithstanding, feedlots are a risk factor that deserve to be examined. The pork lobby’s pressure seems to have succeeded in leading the government to direct public attention away from factory farms [pdf], when a moral, financial, environmental and health analysis of this method of farming is overdue.